Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to Uplink, where we explore the world of digital infrastructure, uncovering the technology, fueling AI and cloud innovation, with the leaders making it happen. I'm your host, michael Reid, and my guest today is Ben Edmund, ceo at ConnectBase. Ben is building the marketplace for connectivity and he'll share his frontline perspective on automating how digital infrastructure is brought and sold all around the world. Let's dive in, ben. Good to see you. Good to see you, michael. Connectbase. I know you founded the company and you're going big. You've got a lot of stuff going on. I'd love to get sort of the data, just the metrics that you guys are doing, because it's sort of pretty astounding. I know you're doing a quadrillion quotes Not quite a quadrillion. We're working on it. What is the appropriate?

Speaker 2: 0:58

We run a lot through the ecosystem and the platform, but last month it was 4.2 million quotes. Last month it was 4.2 million quotes last month, month. Okay, 4.2, 4.2 million, which is pretty good number. Yeah, and that's unique quotes, so not the give me multiple speeds, give me multiple terms, but actually unique quotes.

Speaker 1: 1:17

So it could be it could be based on yeah, exactly, and so what? So what are you providing quotes for? So who are you servicing and what are those quotes?

Speaker 2: 1:28

actually solving Sure. So think of the. I call it the connected world. But the connectivity ecosystem that we sit inside, all things really, from infrastructure layer up through managed services. The dominant quotes set around layer two and layer three services, connectivity. Connectivity is the most prominent thing Ethernet services, cloud connectivity, dia, broadband, that's the dominant. We also do managed services above the stack so think of UCAS and managed security, and then below the stack infrastructure, so cabinets, cross-connects, dark fiber infrastructure. But the biggest volume is in that layer two and layer three connectivity space.

Speaker 1: 2:15

And so that's like I don't know. There's a billion places you could deliver connectivity to and I want to check to see, all right, I've got this've got this location, this location, this location, I've got this data center. Who can provide me connectivity to each one of those? How can I get a cost-effective way of doing that with a reputable supplier? You got that contacting a thousand different companies to figure out who's there and what's there, so presumably your database is just off the charts in terms of I I don't know it's a lot of data.

Speaker 2: 2:44

So right now we have 1.9 trillion rows of location-centric connectivity data in the database, which is a big data set. But we think that's important because, ultimately, if you're trying to create a better experience for the ecosystem and the industry, data really shines light on the next step.

Speaker 1: 3:04

Yeah. So I mean, most companies would know where they are. We can connect you to X number of locations and when you start to and you're not just, you're not just in the United States, you're worldwide. The US is big in itself and complex and very complex, and so then you've got all these locations, then you've got all these locations, then you've got the speeds that they can provide, and then you're adding products.

Speaker 2: 3:29

The type broadband is different than DIA, which is different than Ethernet, which is different?

Speaker 1: 3:34

Dark fiber, yes, and then the companies that are offering those different services, and then it's different pricing and different models, and so then it's not just as simple as put the database in, leave it like Google Maps and maybe take a photo in a few years' time. It should be the same. I assume you're updating this.

Speaker 2: 3:50

You got it, so think about those updates. It becomes a very chatty database. So 1.9 trillion rows, yes, but we update the database about 80 billion times a month. So just you know, that's the.

Speaker 1: 4:05

And I was billion times a month. So just, you know that's the and I was pulling this, yeah, yeah, and you obviously want to automate as much of that as you can. You have to yes, just to get to the scale, which is why we were raised money and built the team that we yeah totally, and so the benefit from a customer like a company is that, um well, actually it's probably not the company themselves that are going to, it's probably the partners that are servicing those companies you got it Exactly right.

Speaker 2: 4:25

So we've been fairly focused on serving the ecosystem that we're directly connected to primarily, Instead of taking what we do and trying to go to every enterprise in the world. We want the channel partners and managed services providers out there to come into this connected ecosystem so they can benefit from it.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Yeah, and so this we're excited by the way of partnering. So we've just joined ConnectBase, which is really exciting. I'm ecstatic. I love what you guys are doing, yeah, and what's cool. I mean, we've always been this. Everything that Megaport's done has been highly automated so it can be delivered instantaneously. We've got APIs to go and suck that information down and the difference is you can show that to someone and then they could deploy, you know, within minutes in fact, 60 seconds is sort of what we would say to actually deploy.

Speaker 1: 5:18

So the the ability for you to show the value that we provide, the cost that we can bring to that, and then I think the next piece is like well, we can deploy what now? Like your answer. So we're excited about that. But something that we've invested in most recently megaport was really well known for this cloud connectivity right. So if you think of megaportort, everyone's like oh, you're the cloud connector. And what people probably don't realize is we're one of the largest data center interconnect companies, like point to point data center. Just very simply, if you're in one data center and another and you need to connect the two of them, a lot of folks missed that Very important service, though in the world today Super critical.

Speaker 1: 5:59

And we've been building out massively. So if you look at all of our 400 gig backbones, which enables us to, in literally 60 seconds, deploy 100 gig between those data centers Wow. So we're excited to sort of more broadly share that, and I think that's one of the challenges with Megaport. We're a small company. Being able to get that message out to a whole range of different providers becomes key, and that's where we're partnering with you. And the other one which we're really ecstatic about is internet. We're one of the only companies we think on the planet that has totally automated the ability to deploy internet. Just to make it simple and easy. That's where the simple and easy button and we should be extremely cost effective and highly resilient. So it's like our value prop is um should be the lowest cost, we should be deployed instantaneously, and we should be more resilient, so it's like cheaper, faster, better, something like that, which is usually pretty good philosophy yeah, that resonates and, at the end of the day, internet is still the most popular request.

Speaker 2: 6:57

It's needed by everyone. It's like oxygen, absolutely the world really does not work without it? Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 1: 7:03

AI, it's still internet. Yeah, exactly, no, we appreciate that. So how many requests for just internet as an example?

Speaker 2: 7:10

You sort of about 65% of our flow today is internet related. Wow, yeah, which is meaningful, yes. Is internet related? Wow, yeah, which is meaningful, yes, uh, up and down the stack, different speeds and feeds and ties, but 65 is a big number let me ask you something.

Speaker 1: 7:23

I was just thinking, as you're sort of saying how many, how many, a lot of telcos, um, are terrestrial bound, like, yeah, absolutely land locked, shall we say, or even country bound, if you you look at Europe. I think one of the unique things about Megaport, one of our differentiators is we've never been bound to physical assets. So, unlike a traditional telco who would have to run fire back monetized asset over 30 years, we actually have the benefit of being able to procure from anyone anywhere, which means we can land everywhere, sure. So how do you see us from a global lens, or how does that in your mind, think of us from a global perspective versus, I assume, every country? You're trying to find the local carrier in that region. So we have um. Is that something unique or something different?

Speaker 2: 8:09

it is and it's really marrying up the, the need. Uh, you know, with simplicity, better, faster, cheaper concept yeah you have.

Speaker 2: 8:17

Wherever that user is Cause, ultimately people are still where they are. You know we can't box them up and stick them inside the data center, so they're going to be geographically diverse, um, but getting that same experience, getting access to the right things, is important to them. And, uh, you know. You look at the activity inside of our platform, across our ecosystem, with, you know, hundreds of partners, you know putting in all these solutions and 65% of the time it's Internet. Those Internet needs are, you know, globally dispersed.

Speaker 1: 8:48

All over the place. Yeah, oh, it's cool. We launched Internet not that long ago. We've had an Internet product for a while and, funny enough, it's such a simple thing for us to add. It's technically complicated in terms of delivering the automation, but that solution is sort of an obvious solution for us to land in. We've seen it's just exploding for us.

Speaker 2: 9:11

And it opens the door to more too, though. Once you land with an internet product, then you start understanding well, hey, there's needs to connect the data centers together, there's needs to connect to the cloud.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Well, the Megaport is when.

Speaker 1: 9:27

I always laugh, it's like the Megaport is like if you're an Uber driver and someone said I need a Megaport, it's like the equivalent of delivering you a wheel when all you need is actually you want to get from a to b.

Speaker 1: 9:38

The port is like the wheel, but the interesting part, it's an important part of that process. So if you just got internet from us as an example, the interesting thing is it comes with a wheel which is the port, and that port then says, all right, you could just use that for internet or for us. You could say, all right, mass connectivity to cloud, or we could go data center to data center connects, or you could start to land with the ecosystem so you could connect, say, to Cloudflare or something that's important to you, or Salesforce, or it's to any of these GPU as a service providers, and so on and so forth. So it's like one port, a billion trillion different options in terms of what you do with it, but it could just start with internet and that's where it scales. So we're excited about that sort of land and then the opportunity to go back and say did you know? You know, did?

Speaker 2: 10:22

you know you could do more with that. Yeah, that's part of our philosophy on that, did you know? We? We believe you know. If you're digital and you put the tools in people's hands, in their framework of how they work, you know good things happen. Yeah, so what we're trying to do is extend that great experience that you guys deliver into the way partners work.

Speaker 1: 10:40

yes, and by doing so, we think we're just going to open up more opportunities for them yeah, I say this a lot like one of the um we see everyone says isn't, isn't megaport? Like a no-brainer? And I'm like it is. You know, um, there's. I always say there's two types types of companies out there. There are those, those customers that have heard of Megaport and they are a customer, and there's that group of companies and then there just are the rest that have never heard of Megaport. Because everyone that's heard of Megaport we can solve a critical need for every company on the planet pretty much. And if you've heard of us, we're so simple, so easy, so cost-effective, so much more resilient and instantaneously deployable. You're like why would you never do that? Our challenge is we're this tiny company with 300 people that live in 26 different countries around the world, so our scale is tricky.

Speaker 2: 11:35

So the partnership is huge In a world of trillions of dollars and lots of things out there and God knows how many.

Speaker 1: 11:42

Yeah, I mean, we're a small sales team in comparison, right. So leveraging your platform is really exciting for us because we get an ability to hopefully make people aware of what we can do, just solve the simple things, and if they're aware of what Megaport can deliver for for them, hopefully we have more of the same which is like oh, we found you, I didn't know you could do that.

Speaker 2: 12:03

oh my god, this is such a no-brainer, I'm so glad you're here sort of thing yeah, when you show up and you're able to participate, then it just makes it easier to then go and say this is what we do, and it becomes that aha moment that triggers a relationship yeah, which is our goal.

Speaker 1: 12:18

And so what are you guys doing? What's the future of connect base? What's next for you?

Speaker 2: 12:21

more patrillions of more data definitely data in there at heart, and I believe it's the foundation for uh, where ai is going to take us. Yeah, be the foundation for great experiences for our partners like yourself. So data is going to be you a foundational element along the journey. We really want to help, you know, transform that buying and selling experience across the ecosystem and continue to bring depth and scope to that around the world. So you'll see us push deeper into Asia-Pac. Europe is our fastest growing region in the world right now and we'll continue to expand there. But you are already so dominant in the United States. Yeah, in the United States we started here. We've penetrated big, medium, small partners, rural broadband, up and down the stack, data, data centers, all kinds of different things and, uh, we're trying to replicate that around the world and the channel model um in the us is different.

Speaker 2: 13:27

I is to and it's much everywhere else actually, and it's growing and it's expanding globally. So is that right? You're starting to see this sort of agent model. We're seeing the US agents themselves. They call them TSBs and TSDs today. Back when I started, it was agents that they were called, but they've been bought by private equity. They've received lots of investments, scaling and growing. Scaling, and part of that scaling motion is to open up Australia, move into Europe and extend around the world.

Speaker 1: 14:03

And I think it's actually different. The whole sort of the way in which the compensation works is so different in the US, but it's probably going to change. I'd say that that model starts to blend more globally.

Speaker 2: 14:14

push out, because it makes sense and you start looking at what is a partner. Yeah, partner can mean lots of different things, both within the us but around the world. Yes, the traditional agency model, the systems integrators, the vars, the distributors, and they're all blending together into this concept. Yes, channel, yes, and the concept, the channel, is really important today and then the.

Speaker 1: 14:38

The first thing is it's a global world and they need to work out how they can get these services where, and you need a really a simple button, as opposed to contacting 50 different carriers in every different country to find out a quote.

Speaker 2: 14:49

That's not real, that's not right and that's where you need it, when you need it yeah. You need it, the way you need it yes. And you need it simple, yeah. And if you need it, simple yes. And if you can do those three things over and over again and add value in a consistent way, it's a really great time to be in this space. Yeah, that's super cool.

Speaker 1: 15:05

It's an exciting business and we appreciate the partnership, so we're looking forward to going big with you this year.

Speaker 2: 15:14

I'm excited. We're a couple weeks away from live. We're going to pull the trigger, we're going to make it happen and open it up to the partners around the world. And I know you've got a big event coming up as well we do. September 3rd through the 5th in Chicago in the US, we're having our Connected World live event Awesome. We'll have over 600 at the event. It's a fantastic learning and relationship building opportunity.

Speaker 1: 15:38

You first founded this company. How on earth did you come to create this thing? What did you get sick of like asking people for quotes?

Speaker 2: 15:46

Yeah, it's really the origin of the business started from my own experience. I started in this industry in the mid-90s with a company called MCI.

Speaker 1: 15:55

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:56

WorldCom Before WorldCom was MCI in this industry in the mid-90s with a company called mci. Yeah, welcome, it was yeah, it was yeah. Before worldcom was gotcha was mci. Yes, uh, I, uh, I was in sales, uh, she went through the the dot com era and he got through the ira crazy times went through the cell tower.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Oh yes, boom and bust. Uh yeah, covid, all kinds of different things. I learned a lot of lessons from building big fiber infrastructure, had a buy side experience with global capacity around aggregation of networks and consuming, and I married those experiences up to recognize that this industry was trading a lot on spreadsheets. Yeah, sending emails back and forth. Very man, having missed experiences around and probably hasn't changed in the last 30 decades?

Speaker 1: 16:41

yeah, maybe, yeah yeah and uh.

Speaker 2: 16:45

You know I I had good outcomes, very good outcomes at my past experiences and but I've wanted to solve something for the industry.

Speaker 1: 16:52

Yeah, I decided to do that in 2015 yeah, well, you're sort of becoming the oracle for it all. It's like the one. What do you call that? The?

Speaker 2: 17:01

one. I'm gonna have to remember that one, yeah, yeah the single source of truth. Yeah, the source of truth is part of the mission. Yeah, we want that location. Truth we call it. Yes, who has what where and can do the best job for whatever is needed to do the best job with the most?

Speaker 1: 17:15

most updated pricing and you may want to run a promotional. You may want to change the pricing rapidly and it needs to be disseminated everywhere. Without everyone's spreadsheet.

Speaker 2: 17:24

And we're really trying to push the concept of attribution, which is what I started from the beginning, because price is absolutely important to get in surface, but people might need it in 60 seconds. People might need a certain level of service and the attributions are part of the decision making.

Speaker 1: 17:41

Pricey, so you're saying do you show like the time it would take to we do something? Yeah, absolutely. Are we the first to just turn up with 60 seconds?

Speaker 2: 17:50

you are the first one, which is pretty cool did you have that written there before?

Speaker 1: 17:54

was it used to be how many days and now you got to put like seconds it goes to a time stamp.

Speaker 2: 17:59

Yeah, that's right. Real time now. Real time now, instantaneous. Oh, that's cool. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, I love what you're doing. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 18:06

Thank you.